I know the feeling. Despite having worked every weekend for the last two years, I know the desire to let it all go and just focus on the important things in life like faith and family. I'll get there, someday, but you can get there now and still be strong at social media management.

See, the challenge is that social media for business is ever-so important. The weekends can be, for many pages and social media profiles, have the highest potential for engagement and interaction. A good chunk of people check social media more regularly on weekends than during the week. It's also a time when money is spent in different ways so having the right engagement to go after the weekend dollars or the dollars that will be spent in the coming week can be achieved more readily on the weekends.

Unfortunately, you probably don't have a weekend team watching and controlling everything for you. You're stuck with it, even if you have weekends off. This translates into one of two most likely scenarios: you either spend time on the weekends using social media or you let your business social media accounts go on the weekends. Either way is bad.

There's an alternative. You can have your weekends (mostly) and still stay on top of social media as a result. Here's how:

1. Set up your mobile alerts. If you have a heavily-trafficked social media presence, you're probably monitoring manually through the week, so you can turn it off then. For the weekends, yes, it means your phone will be blowing up, but you can still stay on top of it and make a decision about replying or waiting until Monday based upon the urgency. Thankfully, if it's a casual communication, there's nothing wrong with waiting until Monday. However, there will be important business communications and you don't want to make those wait.
2. Schedule. When I see businesses that post 5-days a week, it annoys me. Social media doesn't take weekends off and your presence shouldn't, either. If it makes it easier, set up a theme for the weekends. Don't ask questions if you're not ready to answer the responses. There's nothing sillier than blowing a weekend with a question that brings in 500 responses blowing up your phone. Save those for the week.
3. Get creative help. A part-time employee or contractor that you can trust can cover the weekends for you at a very affordable rate. Students and stay-at-home parents come in handy here. Give them tasks that can help during the week as well such as creating content that will be posted later, scheduling up Mondays that are often meeting-heavy, or vetting the new likes and followers from the week.

Social media might not rest, but that doesn't mean you can't. Do it the right way and either minimize or eliminate the need to be omnipresent all week while still maintaining a strong presence.